The Rake Magazine

Tag: sushi

  • IKI STYLE

    Ninety-nine percent of the Mahi Mahi sold in the U.S. mainland comes from South
    America, and it is transported on trucks in very slow 3rd world process, so by
    the time the Mahi reaches the U.S. mainland it has a lot of shelf life on it
    already and the quality is very poor. Many people do not get a very good
    impression of Mahi because of this, and they would not think that Mahi Mahi
    could be a Sashimi fish. However, in Hawaii it is highly prized as a
    sashimi fish.

    In Hawaii, the Mahi Mahi is considered to be so good that only
    the high end restaurants can afford to buy it. Many of the lower end restaurants
    actually do not serve local Mahi, but frozen imports.

    The technique used to
    catch "day boat" sashimi grade Mahi Mahi in Hawaii is called "IKI STYLE" (aka:
    ika shibi style). Essentially, the idea is to stablize this fish right after the
    catch, because Mahi Mahi has a tendency to flop around a lot when you take them
    out of the water. Many mainland fishermen and in other regions of the world do
    not realize that this is the time when your meat most vulnerable. Unnecessary
    flopping around ruins the meat, because the fish is stressed out and the histamine
    levels in the fish build up and go right into the meat. This is the difference
    between "sashimi" quality and just regular plain old Mahi Mahi.

    The "Iki" method
    is an old Japanese technique. As soon as the fish comes out the water they
    do not let it flop around. Instead, they stick a metal rod down the spine of the
    fish, stabilizing the fish, but at the same time not killing the fish. (Basically,
    it paralyzes the fish.) This way the fisherman keep the fish on ice all the way
    into port, and then right before they get ready to dock they pull the rod out
    the spine of the fish. This makes it as if you caught the fish right out of
    water and produces an amazing quality of Mahi Mahi meat unlike anywhere in the
    world. This unique method is only practiced in Japan and Hawaii.

  • Sushi: The Naked Truth, part one!

    It seems that not even ten years ago sushi was hardly known, or worse in smaller communities it was known as "bait." And if you asked someone if they liked sushi or if they had eaten sushi, the typical response was, "What suesheee??? Nahhh, we don’t eat our bait!"

    Now if you look around today sushi is everywhere! Spreading like a wildfire, sushi restaurants are popping up in every community. Grocery stores are jumping on the band wagon, and even American restaurants are being influenced with a bit of sashimi or tuna tar tar, etc.

    Like anything else that gets popular with rapid growth, the core is often forgotten, lost, overseen, or simply ignored.

    Spicy tuna: Spicy tuna came to be because when a tuna loin is cut down you will only get about an inch or so of good meat left before the skin because the amount of fascia (white connective tissue) is too chewy for it to be used for nigiri, sashimi, or even a roll.

    Because it is good meat, and sometimes even great if it’s fatty, and it’s toro, we take a spoon and scrape the meat to separate it from the fascia. The end product looks like ground beef and is then made into spicy tuna.

    I’ve had a few customers complain that our spicy tuna is too soft or mushy. Well, that’s because it’s not frozen chunked tuna; this is the real deal!!

    On that note, if you go to a sushi bar and see spicy hamachi, spicy scallops, spicy this or that, it’s not good because they are not turning the fish and as its starts to stink it’s masked with spices and sold, when it should be tossed.

    Cheers,

    Henry C,
    Giapponese

  • Extreme Naked Sushi

    I got a press release the other day from Temple, Thom Pham’s
    Asian Fusion restaurant, announcing that on March 8, the restaurant will hold
    a Nyotaimori / Nantaimori event.
    "Nyotaimori and Nantaimori," the press release helpful explains, "are accepted
    traditions in Japan of serving sashimi and sushi off of the body of a woman or
    a man. It has been practiced for centuries, initiated as an art by the
    Geisha Community."

    This struck me as a bit dubious. Given the traditional
    status of women in Japanese society, it wouldn’t surprise if me salarymen out
    for a night on the town might use naked geishas as serving trays. But naked
    men? Maybe it happens, but I doubt it has been practiced for centuries.

    "Temple has been noted for its unique and beautiful
    presentation of Sushi," the press release continues. "Now Temple
    continues in its pursuit of presenting sushi as a true form of ‘Art.’"

    It turns out this is a trend that has come and gone in other
    parts of the world. According to an article on the website, Japan for the
    Uninvited    , body sushi "received a lot of media attention in the West in the
    1990s. This coverage massively exaggerated the popularity of nyotaimori in
    Japan – these restaurants are actually very rare, and generally associated with
    organized crime rather than being mainstream."

    If Tom Pham really wants to be on the cutting edge, he could try serving wakame sake, which, according to Japan for the Uninvited, "is poured down a model’s body and drunk from the cup formed by her closed thighs. The name “wakame“, meaning soft seaweed, refers to the pubic hair floating in the drink. This is not widely-practiced, and wakame sake is even rarer than nyotaimori."

    Well, naked sushi still sounded like a good idea to me. But March 8
    seems like a long time to wait, though, and the cost for nyotaimori night at
    Temple – $75 per person, including sushi, sake and champagne, is a little
    beyond my budget. So I stopped off at the Midtown Global Market, and picked up
    a six-piece sushi sampler from the Sea Port Market: two pieces apiece of
    salmon, tuna and eel.

    I think I probably could have talked the missus into letting
    me eat sushi off of her naked body. It was the part about letting me take a
    picture of her naked with sushi on her body and post it on this blog that was
    the deal-breaker. So I suggested instead that she take a picture of me with the
    sushi artfully displayed on my body. She didn’t think this was a very tasteful
    idea, but I am willing to let the public judge for itself – I am willing to
    take risks for my art.

    This she was willing to do.

    We have two cats, Edgar and Hazel, who are usually
    restricted to a diet of raw kibble, but this definitely aroused their
    curiosity. These guys work as a team. While Carol was arranging the sushi and
    chopsticks, Hazel snuck up behind her and started licking one of the pieces of
    salmon. Then Eddie started licking the tuna on my chest.

    At any rate, Carol dutifully snapped the photo of the tuna –
    a piece that the cats had not touched. And then she tasted it. "Tastes like
    cold sushi," she said.

    Edgar declined comment.

     

  • Think You Know Sushi?

    Test your sushi knowledge with this fun sushi quiz:

     

    1) Which specialty sushi roll was invented in America?:

    a) the spider roll

    b)
    the rainbow roll

    c)
    the California roll

     

    2) What gives most sushi-bar salmon that bright orange
    color?

    a)
    their diet of krill and plankton

    b) their genes

    c) food coloring

     

    3) What gives most sushi-bar tuna that bright red color?

    a) hemoglobin

    b) mercury

    c) carbon monoxide

     

    4) Which religious organization makes millions from sales of fish
    to the sushi market?

    a)
    The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons)

    b) Jehovah’s Witnesses

    c) The Unification Church (the Moonies)

     

    5) Which popular sushi fish is banned in Japan?

    a) fugu (blowfish)

    b) koi (goldfish)

    c) matsu (super white tuna)

     

    6) That little wedge of green putty on your sushi boat is
    most likely:

    a)
    real wasabi – "Wasabia japonica"

    b)
    fake wasabi

    c) Play-Doh

     

    Answers:

    1. All of the above. Those high-fat specialty rolls are an
    American invention.

    2.c Most sushi bar salmon is farm-raised on a diet of fish
    meal. Two chemicals, astaxanthin and canthaxanthin are commonly added to their
    diet to give them the orange color of wild-caught salmon. The European Union
    recently set limits on the use of canthaxanthin, because it can damage eyesight
    in high doses/

    3. Raw tuna, whether fresh or previously frozen, quickly
    turns brown. If your tekka maki is bright red, the odds are pretty good that it
    has been treated with carbon monoxide. The ever-vigilant Food and Drug
    Administration permits the practice, but, according to the New York Times,
    carbon monoxide treatment is banned in Canada, Japan and the European Union
    because it can be used to conceal spoilage.

    4. c According to a detailed investigative report in the
    Chicago Tribune, most of America’s estimated 9,000 sushi restaurants get their
    raw fish from a company called True World, which is a subsidiary of Unification
    Church International, a company with close ties to the church.

    5. c. Matsu, often sold as "white tuna" or "super white
    tuna" isn’t actually tuna at all – it’s escolar, also known as snake mackerel
    or walu. Its fat contains waxy esters
    that can cause gastrointestinal symptoms, including diarrhea and oily orange
    leakage. Because of these side effects, it has been banned in Japan since 1977.

    6. b. Odds are, it’s fake wasabi, a cheap blend of
    horseradish, mustard and food coloring. Real wasabi, wasabia japonica,
    which has a more subtle flavor, is hard to grow and very expensive – up to $100
    a pound.

  • Something Fishy in Woodbury

    I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I drove out to
    Giapponese, the new sushi bar / restaurant in Woodbury. Sushi is everywhere
    these days, including the refrigerator cases of local supermarkets, and since
    the sushi restaurants all tend to get the same ingredients from the same
    suppliers, it has become a pretty generic product. But the name – Italian for
    “Japanese” — was intriguing, and the online menu sounded pretty interesting:
    smoked salmon bruschetta and poki (the Hawaiian version of tuna tartare); and
    some varieties of fish and shellfish that seldom show up on local sushi menus,
    such as kawahagi (file fish, a member of the blowfish family) kinmeidai (golden eye snapper), kohada (gizzard shad) and walu (the Hawaiian name for a variety of escolar, sometimes sold as white tuna.

    When I asked for omakase (chef’s choice), chef-owner Henry
    Chan immediately knew what I wanted, and proceeded to serve up a delightful
    series of courses: raw scallop, Tasmanian salmon, halibut rolled in a thin
    ribbon of cucumber, a whole small mackerel presented as sashimi, and a roll of
    tempura shrimp and avocado topped with tuna. Chan, who grew up in Wisconsin, recently moved here from Eau Claire, where he owns
    the town’s only sushi bar, the Shanghai Bistro.

    Chan clearly has a passion for sushi, and listening to him, he sounds really committed to bringing in the best quality and most interesting varieties he can find. The selection is still pretty limited, but he says that as his sales volume grows, he will be adding more varieties. If you want to be notified when new and interesting varieties of sushi and seafood are available, send him an email at twinscroll@gmail.com. I just got an email yesterday, announcing the arrival of his live tanks (for holding lobster and shrimp), and a shipment of Hamma Hamma oysters from Washington state.

    I’d like to go back sometime to try the Kobe beef steaks – a 16 ounce bone-in New York Strip and a 14 ounce ribeye, both $55. This isn’t the original Kobe beef from Japan, where the cattle are massaged daily and fed rations of beer, but it’s the same breed, Wagyu. Chan gets his beef from a friend who has a herd of Wagyu near Augusta, Wisconsin. $55 for a steak sounds pretty steep, compared to what other restaurants charge, it’s a bargain. Locally, Cosmos has imported Japanese Kobe beef on its menu for $17 an ounce (which would work out to $272 for a 16-ounce steak), and even that is a bargain compared to Craftsteak in Las Vegas. Craftsteak charges $105 for a 14-ounce American Wagyu ribeye, $184 for an eight-ounce Australian Wagyu ribeye, and $240 for an eight-ounce Japanese Wagyu steak – which works out to $480 a pound.

    Giapponese Sushi
    10060 Citywalk Drive
    Woodbury, MN 55129
    Phone: 651-578-7777


  • Sushi a la Francaise, Chinese-Style

    We stopped in last night at Musashi, the new Japanese
    restaurant in the former Olive Garden space at 6th and Hennepin,
    downtown, and took a seat at the sushi bar.

    When I asked for omakase, the sushi chef who greeted us gave
    me a puzzled look.

    "Teppanyaki?," he
    asked – or something that sounded like that.

    "No, "I said, "omakase."

    "We don’t have that."

    Just then, a second sushi chef, Noua, overheard our
    conversation, and stepped in: "I can do that. How many courses do you want? How
    much do you want to spend? Four courses? Five?

    Omakase means, roughly, "chef’s choice," and when I have
    tried this gambit before, the results have ranged from spectacular (Fuji-ya in
    Saint Paul,) to the same stuff we could have ordered from the menu.

    We never did agree on a price, but a series of off the menu
    dishes started to arrive, starting with a pair of martini glasses, filled with
    chunks of raw tuna and salmon with thin slices of cucumber in a soy marinade .
    The novelty of this dish was the fake ice cube at the bottom of each glass,
    each with a little blinking light that changed colors from to blue to green.
    (Actually, mine was stuck on blue.)

    Round two was four pieces of raw salmon wrapped around
    spears of fresh mango, served over leaves of aromatic Japanese chrysanthemum.
    partially cooked with a blow torch by the first sushi chef, presented with a
    mound of shredded daikon at the center, topped with a little dollop of lumpfish
    caviar. Buried beneath the daikon was
    another light cube, again flashing red, blue and green. A little less novel
    this time, but still an attractive presentation.

    Then came a third course – a sort of seafood medley covered
    in a spicy mayonnaise the color of Thousand Island dressing, dappled with
    orange flying fish row. Actually quite tasty.

    And for the grand finale, four little rice balls wrapped in
    eel and white tuna, again presented with a flashing litecube by chef #1. This
    was, he informed us, "French-style sushi."

    I have never seen anything like it in France, but the
    phrase, French-style sushi rang a bell. The last place I went that offered
    "French-style sushi" was the Mt. Fuji in Maple Grove, which serves up neon
    day-glo fantasies on the theme of sushi far more elaborate than anything
    dreamed of in the land of the rising sun. The chefs at Mt. Fuji are Chinese, as
    are the owners of Musashi, and Wasabi, which opened last year near the
    Metrodome.

    It turns out that Minneapolis may be prt of a global trend. According to a December 2006 report from Agence France-Presse, an estimated 90 percent of all the Japanese-style restaurants in France are Chinese-owned.

    So I asked sushi chef #1 where he was from, and he said,
    China. "Are you all from China?" I asked. "We’re from Asia," sushi chef #3
    offered, helpfully. "Not me, " shouted out Noua, in perfect English " I’m from Saint
    Paul."

    Overall, some of the off-the-menu omakase dishes were pretty good, some of it was just okay, and mostly it was kind of weird. It certainly didn’t seem very Japanese, but maybe that’s okay. Neither is teppanyaki, really, nor California rolls. I did see a lot of "normal" sushi come out of the sushi bar while we were dining, and it looked the same as it does everywhere else.

    Bottom line: dinner
    with the four omakase dishes and a spicy tuna roll, plus tax, tip, and a couple
    of drinks apiece came to just under $120.